Some tracks refuse to ask for your attention politely; they kick the door off the hinges instead. That is exactly what happens when you press play on 'Father Time & Mother Nature'. Texas singer-songwriter Clay DuBose is back after a twenty-year break, and he brought the heat with him. This is not a quiet, acoustic reflection on getting older. It is a full-throttle Americana rock record...

On his bracing new single “Jolie,” New York City songwriter and guitarist Owen Steib channels 1990s college-rock bite to reckon with a devastating story of lost innocence. The 18-year-old high school senior constructs a fragmented, out-of-order mystery around an exiled girl caught in the wreckage of an irreversible, violent incident. Instead of spelling out the tragedy cleanly, Steib drops cryptic, evocative breadcrumbs a denim...